Abe Lincoln,
Anti-Catholic?
Hugh Turley and I begin Chapter 19, “Pope
Francis and Thomas Merton,” of our 2018 book, The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An
Investigation,
this way:
On September 24, 2015, Pope Francis became
the first pope to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress. He singled out four Americans to mention as
model citizens, Abraham Lincoln, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, and Thomas
Merton.
Three of them were advocates for
peace. Lincoln, by contrast, embarked
upon a war of choice to bring the residents of seceding states back into the
Union, a war that would become the nation’s deadliest. Lincoln’s contemporary, Pope Pius IX, hardly
shared Pope Francis’ admiration for the unreligious president. Although the Vatican officially favored the
Union cause, Pope Pius IX was deeply disturbed by the carnage of the war. Lincoln, however, rejected the pope’s efforts
to mediate an end to it. The pope was
also concerned over the Union’s cynical use of desperate Irish Catholic
immigrants as virtual cannon fodder in the Union army.
I have only recently discovered quotes
attributed to Lincoln that, if accurate, would make the lauding of the man by
the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, whenever it might have been done, far
less appropriate than we thought it was when we wrote our book.
The initial speaker here and the supplier
of the quotation marks is the Presbyterian minister and former Roman Catholic
priest, Charles Chiniquy, writing in his 1884 book, 50
Years in the Church of Rome: The
quotes come from two meetings Chiniquy claims to have
had with Lincoln in the White House, the first in late August of 1861 and the
second some time after a December 8, 1863, letter from Pope Pius IX to
Confederate President Jefferson Davis had been made public:
“I am so glad to meet you again,” he said:
“you see that your friends, the Jesuits, have not yet killed me. But they would have surely done it when I
passed through their most devoted city, Baltimore, had I not defeated their
plans, by passing incognito a few hours
before they expected me. We have proof
that the company which has been selected and organized to murder me was led by
a rabid Roman Catholic, called Byrne; it was almost entirely composed of Roman
Catholics; more than that, there were two disguised priests among them, to lead
and encourage them. I am sorry to have
so little time to see you: but I will not let you go before telling you that, a
few days ago, I saw Mr. [Samuel F.B.] Morse, the learned inventor of electric
telegraphy; he told me that when he was in Rome, not long ago, he found out the
proofs of a most formidable conspiracy against this country and all its
institutions. It is evident that it is
to the intrigues and emissaries of the Pope that we owe, in great part, the
horrible evil war which is threatening to cover the country with blood and
ruins.
“I am sorry that Professor Morse had to
leave Rome before he could know more about the secret plans of the Jesuits
against the liberties and the very existence of this country. But do you know that I want you to take his
place and continue that investigation?”
-
-
“I am sorry, that the twenty minutes I had
consecrated to our interview have almost passed away; I will be for ever [sic] grateful for the warning words you have
addressed to me about the dangers ahead of my life, from Rome. I know that they are not imaginary
dangers. If I were fighting against a
Protestant South, as a nation, there would be no danger of assassination. The nations who read the Bible, fight bravely
on the battle-fields [sic], but they do not
assassinate their enemies. The Pope and
the Jesuits, with their infernal Inquisition, are the only organized powers in
the world which have recourse to the dagger of the assassin to murder those
whom they cannot convince with their arguments or conquer with the sword.
“Unfortunately, I feel more and more,
every day, that it is not against the Americans of the South, alone, I am
fighting, it is more against the Pope of Rome, his perfidious Jesuits and their
blind and blood-thirsty slaves, than against the real American Protestants,
that we have to defend ourselves. Here
is the real danger of our position. So
long as they will hope to conquer the North, they will spare me; but the day we
will rout their armies (and that day will surely come, with the help of God),
take their cities, and force them to submit, then, it is my impression that the
Jesuits, who are the principal rulers of the South, will do what they have
almost invariably done in the past. The
dagger, or the pistol of one of their adepts, will do what the strong hands of
the warriors could not achieve. This
civil war seems to be nothing but a political affair to those who do not see,
as I do, the secret springs of that terrible drama. But it is more a religious than a civil
war. It is Rome who wants to rule and
degrade the North, as she has ruled and degraded the South, from the very day
of its discovery. There are only very
few of the Southern leaders who are not more or less under the influence of the
Jesuits, through their wives, family relations, and their friends. Several members of the family of Jeff Davis
belong to the Church of Rome. Even the
Protestant ministers are under the influence of the Jesuits without suspecting
it. To keep her ascendancy in the North,
as she does in the South, Rome is doing here what she has done in Mexico, and
in all the South American Republics, she is paralyzing, by a civil war, the
arms of the soldiers of Liberty. She
divides our nation, on order to weaken, subdue and rule it.
“Surely we have
some brave and reliable Roman Catholic officers and soldiers in our armies, but
they form an insignificant minority when compared with the Roman Catholic
traitors against whom we have to guard ourselves, day and night. The fact is, that the immense majority of
Roman Catholic bishops, priests and laymen, are rebels in heart, when they
cannot be in fact; with very few exceptions, they are publicly in favor of
slavery. I understand now, why the
patriots of France, who determined to see the colors of Liberty floating over
their great and beautiful country, were forced to hang or shoot almost all the
priests and the monks as the irreconcilable enemies of Liberty. For it is a fact, which is now evident to me,
that with very few exceptions, every priest and every true Roman Catholic is a
determined enemy of Liberty. Their
extermination in France, was one of those terrible necessities which no human
wisdom could avoid; it looks to me now as an order from heaven to save
France. May God grant that the same
terrible necessity be never felt in the United States! But there is a thing which is very certain;
it is, that if the American people could learn what I know of the fierce hatred
of the generality of the priests of Rome against our institutions, our schools,
our most sacred rights, and our so dearly bought liberties, they would drive
them away, tomorrow, from among us, or they would shoot them as traitors. But I keep those sad secrets in my heart; you
are the only one to whom I reveal them, for I know that you learned them before
me. The history of these last thousand
years tells us that wherever the Church of Rome is not a dagger to pierce the
bosom of a free nation, she is a stone to her neck, and a ball to her feet, to
paralyze her, and prevent her advance in the ways of civilization, science,
intelligence, happiness and liberty.”
-
-
“This war would have never been possible
without the sinister influence of the Jesuits.
We owe it to Popery that we now see our land reddened with the blood of
her noblest sons. Though there were great
differences of opinion between the South and the North, on the question of
slavery, neither Jeff Davis nor any one of the leading men of the Confederacy
would have dared to attack the North, had they not relied on the promises of
the Jesuits, that under the mask of Democracy, the money and the arms of the
Roman Catholics, even the arms of France, were at their disposal, if they would
attack us. I pity the priests, the
bishops and the monks of Rome in the United States, when the people realize that
they are, in great part, responsible for the tears and the blood shed [sic] in
this war; the later the more terrible will the retribution be. I conceal what I know, on that subject, from
the knowledge of the nation; for if the people knew the whole truth, this war
would turn into a religious war, and it would, at once, take a tenfold more
savage and bloody character, it would become merciless as all religious wars
are. It would become a war of
extermination on both sides. The
Protestants of both the North and the South would surely unite to exterminate
the priests and the Jesuits, if they could hear what Professor Morse has said
to me of the plots made in the very city of Rome to destroy this Republic, and
if they could learn how the priests, the nuns, and the monks, which daily land
on our shores, under the pretext of preaching their religion, instructing the
people in their schools, taking care of the sick in the hospitals, are nothing
else but the emissaries of the Pope, of Napoleon [III], and the other despots
of Europe, to undermine our institutions, alienate the hearts of our people
from our constitution, and our laws, destroy our schools, and prepare a reign
of anarchy here as they have done in Ireland, in Mexico, in Spain, and wherever
there are any people who want to be free, etc.”
-
-
“When [General George] Meade was to order
the pursuit, after the battle [of Gettysburg], a stranger came, in haste, to
the headquarters, and that stranger was a disguised Jesuit. After a ten minutes’ conversation with him,
Meade made such arrangements for the pursuit of the enemy, that he escaped
almost untouched, with the loss of only two guns!
“You’re right,” continued the President,
“when you say that his letter of the Pope has entirely changed the nature and
the ground of the war. Before they read
it, the Roman Catholics could see that I was fighting against Jeff Davis and
his Southern Confederacy. But now, they
must believe that it is against Christ and His holy vicar, the Pope, that I am
raising my sacrilegious hands; we have the daily proofs that their indignation,
their hatred, their malice, against me, are a hundredfold intensified. New projects of assassination are detected
almost every day, accompanied with such savage circumstances, that they bring
to my memory the massacre of the St. Bartholomew and the Gunpowder Plot. We feel, at their investigation, that they
come from the same masters in the art of murder, the Jesuits.
“The New York riots were evidently a
Romish plot from beginning to end. We
have the proofs in hand that they were the work of Bishop [John Joseph] Hughes
and his emissaries. No doubt can remain
in the minds of the most incredulous about the bloody attempts of Rome to
destroy New York, when we know the easy way it was stopped. I wrote to Bishop Hughes, telling him that
the whole country would hold him responsible for it if he would not stop it at
once. He then gathered the rioters
around his palace, called them his ‘dear friends,’ invited them to go back home
peacefully, and all was finished! So Jupiter of old used to raise a storm and stop it with a
nod of his head!
“From the beginning of our civil war,
there has been, not a secret, but a public alliance, between the Pope of Rome
and Jeff Davis, and that alliance has followed the common laws of this world’s
affairs. The greater has led the
smaller, the stronger has guided the weaker.
The Pope and his Jesuits have advised, supported, and directed Jeff
Davis on the land, from the first gun shot at Fort Sumter, by the rabid Roman
Catholic Beauregard. They are helping
him on the sea by guiding and supporting the other rabid Roman Catholic pirate,
[Admiral Raphael] Semmes, on the ocean.
And they will help the rebellion when firing their last gun to shed the
blood of the last soldier of Liberty, who will fall in this fratricidal
war. In my interview with Bishop Hughes,
I told him, ‘that every stranger who had sworn allegiance to our government by
becoming a United States citizen, as himself, was liable to be shot or hung as
a perjured traitor and an armed spy, as the sentence of the court-martial may
direct. And he will be so shot and
hanged accordingly, as there will be no exchange of such prisoners.’ After I had put this flea in the ears of the
Romish bishop, I requested him to go and report my words to the Pope. Seeing the dangerous position of his bishops
and priests when siding with the rebels, my hope was that he would advise them,
for their own interests, to become loyal and true to their allegiance and help
us through the remaining part of the war.
But the result has been the very contrary. The Pope has thrown away the mask, and shown himself the public partisan and protector of
the rebellion, by taking Jeff Davis by the hand, and impudently recognizing the
Southern States as a legitimate government.
Now, I have the proof in hand that that very Bishop Hughes, whom I had
sent to Rome that he might induce the Pope to urge the Roman Catholics of the
North at least, to be true to their oath of allegiance, and whom I thanked
publicly, when, under the impression that he had acted honestly, according to
the promise he had given me, is the very man who advised the Pope to recognize
the legitimacy of the Southern Republic, and put the whole weight of his tiara
in the balance against us in favor of our enemies! Such is the perfidy of those Jesuits. Two cankers are biting the very entrails of
the United States today: the Romish and the Mormon priests. Both are equally at work to form a people of
the most abject, ignorant and fanatical slaves, who will recognize no other
authority but their supreme pontiffs.
Both are aiming at the destruction of our schools, to raise themselves
upon our ruins. Both shelter themselves
under our grand and holy principles of liberty of conscience, to destroy that
very liberty of conscience, and bind the world before their heavy and
ignominious yoke. The Mormon and the
Jesuit priests are equally the uncompromising enemies of our constitution and
our laws, but the more dangerous of the two is the Jesuits the Romish priest,
for he knows better how to conceal his hatred under the mask of friendship and
public good: he is better trained to commit the most cruel and diabolical deeds
for the glory of God. Till lately, I was
in favor of the unlimited liberty of conscience as our constitution gives it to
the Roman Catholics. But now, it seems
to me that, sooner or later, the people will be forced to put a restriction to
that clause towards the Papists. Is it
not an act of folly to give absolute liberty of conscience to a set of men who
are publicly sworn to cut our throats the very day they have their opportunity
for doing it? Is it right to give the
privilege of citizenship to men who are the sworn and public enemies of our
constitution, our laws, our liberties, and our lives?
“The very moment that Popery assumed the
right of life and death on a citizen of France, Spain, Germany, England, or the
United States, it assumed to be the power, the government of France, Spain,
England, Germany, and the United States.
Those States then committed a suicidal act by allowing Popery to put a
foot on their territory with the privilege of citizenship. The power of life and death is the supreme
power, and two supreme powers cannot exist on the same territory without
anarchy, riots, bloodshed, and civil wars without end. When Popery will give up the power of life
and death which it proclaims on its own divine power, in all its theological
books and canon laws, then, and then alone, it can be tolerated and can receive
the privileges of citizenship in a free country.
“Is it not an absurdity to give to a man a
thing which he is sworn to hate, curse, and destroy? And does not the Church of Rome hate, curse,
and destroy liberty of conscience whenever she can do it safely? I am for liberty of conscience in its
noblest, broadest, highest sense. But I
cannot give liberty of conscience to the Pope and to his followers, the
Papists, so long as they tell me, through all their councils, theologians, and canon
laws, that their conscience orders them to burn my wife, strangle my children,
and cut my throat when they find their opportunity! This does not seem to be understood by the
people today. But sooner or later, the
light of common sense will make it clear to every one
that no liberty of conscience can be granted to men who are sworn to obey a
Pope, who pretends to have the right to put to death those who differ from him
in religion.”
Analysis
There are quite a few things that are profoundly
disturbing in the foregoing passages, but this is what really jumped out at me:
I understand now, why the patriots of
France, who determined to see the colors of Liberty floating over their great
and beautiful country, were forced to hang or shoot almost all the priests and
the monks as the irreconcilable enemies of Liberty. For it is a fact, which is now evident to me,
that with very few exceptions, every priest and every true Roman Catholic is a
determined enemy of Liberty. Their
extermination in France, was one of those terrible necessities which no human
wisdom could avoid; it looks to me now as an order from heaven to save France.
He is speaking, of course, about the
bloody French Revolution of 1789-1799, and
like much of the rest of what we see here, there is only a loose sort of
connection with the known historical facts.
To be sure, many of the horrible excesses of the revolution were
directed at the Catholic Church, but the revolutionaries did not execute
“almost all” the priests and monks, and when they did kill them the favored
weapon was the guillotine. Punishment
was directed primarily of the hard core traditionalists who refused to swear
allegiance to the new revolutionary state, and it often took the form of exile to Guiana in South
America. The really shocking thing here,
though, is that dear old Honest Abe sounds here like he would have
whole-heartedly approved if every last one of them had been killed, because it
was just one of those “terrible necessities.”
Could these really be the words of the
“wise” and “moderate” man who penned the last paragraph of his second inaugural address, now
engraved in stone upon his memorial?
With
malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God
gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to
bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle,
and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish, a
just and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.
The Lincoln of our newly discovered quotes
comes across more like a 19th century Joseph Stalin than the wise
looking granite figure seated in the Parthenon copy at the west end of
Washington’s Mall. Could it possibly be
accurate? Well, consider the fact that,
as Lincoln nemesis, Thomas
DiLorenzo, has recently informed us in an article entitled, “Why the Marxist
Left Loves Lincoln,”
Karl Marx, himself, was a twice-weekly columnist from 1852 to 1862 for Horace
Greeley’s New York Tribune, the “mouthpiece of the Republican Party” and
that Lincoln and Marx corresponded with one another. Bearing that fact in mind, it becomes much easier
to see Lincoln regarding himself as the noble, progressive bearer of the flag
of the Republic against the country’s Ancien
Régime, as represented by leaders of the
Confederacy.
But
isn’t the man really off into historical cloud cuckoo land with his
characterization of the Confederacy as little more than the creation of a
Catholic Church determined to destroy our great experiment in democracy? Did he not know that, even in his own day,
the South was the most overwhelmingly Protestant part of the country, General
Beauregard and Admiral Semmes, notwithstanding?
Consider
the really bad history, though, in the ringing first line of what was Lincoln’s
most famous utterance, his Gettysburg Address, “Four score and seven years ago our
fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty,
and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
It
was the very basis upon which he made war upon the seceding states, and it is a
complete fiction, as I point out in “Mencken
and More on Lincoln’s Speech.” Doing the math, he’s talking about 1776, the
year of the Declaration of Independence, that is to say, the secession
manifesto of 13 colonies of the British Empire in North America. It was very far from a “new nation” at that
point. Even when the colonies created
their United States of America in 1789 when the Constitution became effective,
it was universally regarded as a voluntary union. None of the colonies would have signed on had
they regarded it as arrangement to which they would be permanently attached by military
force.
We
see some more bad history in the interpretation of the Pope’s letter to
Jefferson Davis. The last word on that
subject can be found in a recent Internet posting entitled, “Pope Pius IX and the Southern Confederacy in the Civil War”:
An
examination of the [Dec. 8, 1863] letter bears out that it was not meant
as an indication that the pope was choosing sides. It was certainly a
sympathetic letter, expressing a desire for peace that the pope shared with the
Confederate president. However, there is nothing in the letter wishing victory
for the Confederacy or condemning the Union. Nonetheless, the letter was
published by the South across their states, and
presented as if it were recognition of their cause from Rome.
The
passages from Lincoln suggest that he was misreading the letter in the same way
that it was being misrepresented in the South, although, in a less than purely
legalistic sense, the letter might well have been interpreted as a show of
favoritism toward the Southern cause, and for good reason:
Pope
Pius IX was a revered figure in the post war South. General Robert E. Lee kept
a portrait of him in his house, and referred to him as
the South's only true friend during her time of need. Both Davis and Lee were
Episcopalians, as were many Southerners before the War, a denomination which
had many things in common with Catholicism before the 20th century influence of
Modernism of course. Davis was frequently visited by Southern Catholic nuns
during his imprisonment, who delivered messages for him and prayed for his
release. He eventually was released, having never stood trial, on the grounds
that he committed no real crime. It is believed the majority of justices on the
U.S. Supreme Court at that time acknowledged the right of secession.
That
passage is from “Pope Pius IX and the Confederacy,” on a traditionalist web site called “The Catholic
Knight.”
Returning
to the Lincoln quotes, the antagonistic relationship between New York’s
Archbishop Hughes and Lincoln that we see here is also quite inconsistent with
what is generally regarded to be the historical record. The following passage is from “Onward Catholic Soldiers: The Catholic Church During the
American Civil War” by Mark Summers:
While
precise statistics on Catholic service in the Civil War are unknown, the vast
majority of the Irish and thus Catholic community sided with the Union over the
Confederacy. While the Irish devotion to the Union cause can largely be
attributed to circumstance of settlement rather than conviction, there were leaders
among the Irish Catholic episcopate that loudly championed the Federal Cause.
Archbishop Hughes of New York rallied Catholic northerners to his side, calling
for the national flag to be displayed at churches, and advocating conscription,
a practice that would prove to be unpopular with the Irish Catholic working
class. Archbishop Hughes defended the draft, saying it was "not cruel…this
is mercy…this is humanity." He believed that "anything that will put
an end to their drenching with blood the whole surface of the county, that will
be humanity." He also went on a diplomatic mission to Europe to ensure
neutrality among the papal and Catholic majority nations.
Also, from his Wikipedia page, Hughes hardly
comes across as the sort of hidebound conservative who would have needed to
have been whipped into line by Lincoln with the threat of hanging as a traitor
in order for him to be a good Unionist.
The easy thing to do, at this point, would
be to dismiss all these supposed Lincoln quotes as the fabrications of the
Reverend Charles Chiniquy. After all, he wrote them as though they were
verbatim quotes some two decades after his conversations took place. How could he have remembered everything
Lincoln said so precisely? And if there
was ever a man with an anti-Roman Catholic axe to grind, it was the Canadian-born
Chiniquy.
Since these were private conversations between him and Lincoln, there
was no one alive who could contradict them, and who better to lend weight to
the anti-Catholic argument that he wanted to make than the admired and martyred
president? From his Wikipedia page, we
gather that Chiniquy was a bit of a dodgy character,
also running afoul of the Presbytery of Chicago over administration of charity
funds and a college.
On the other hand, I encountered the
excerpts in the long appendix to the book, Rome’s
Responsibility for the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln by Thomas H.
Harris, published in 1892. The appendix
is all taken from Chiniquy’s book. Harris was a member of the U.S. military
commission that tried the hanged the conspirators convicted of assassinating
Lincoln. Harris, who seems to share Chiniquy’s animus towards Catholics, introduces the
appendix as follows:
The following is an excerpt from 50
Years in the Church of Rome, by Charles Chiniquy. Minister Chiniquy
was a former Roman Catholic priest, who was saved by the grace of God. He was freed from the superstitions of Rome
and became a beloved minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ and one of the most
famous Protestant preachers of his time.
For example, his 80th birthday was attended by 2,000 friends
and followers, including many prominent citizens and ministers, who gave
speeches lauding Chiniquy. His birthday celebration was reported on the
front page of the Wednesday, July 31, 1889, edition of the Chicago Tribune. Incidently [sic], Chiniquy’s 80th birthday was five years after
the publication of his book, 50 Years in the Church of Rome. When Chiniquy died,
his obituary appeared on the front page of the Tuesday, January 17, 1899,
edition of The New York Times, with a eulogy praising his many
accomplishments. Chiniquy
was a friend of Abraham Lincoln. Their
friendship began when Lincoln, who was a practicing lawyer, represented Chiniquy in litigation.
Chiniquy was a Catholic priest at that time,
and Abraham Lincoln agreed to represent him by an agent of the corrupt Roman
Catholic Bishop [Anthony] O’Regan of Chicago.
From this passage, we gather that Chiniquy was held in somewhat higher esteem than we might
believe from just reading the Wikipedia page.
But taking the other side of the matter
again, it is very difficult to believe that a slick politician like Lincoln
would ever have said such incendiary things to anyone outside of his immediate
family. He was a master at manipulating
public opinion for his own benefit, and he must have known that had these
remarks reached the general public at the time the results could have been
devastating. He stood to lose the
support of every Catholic, and his apparent endorsement of the worst excesses
of the French Revolution would have threatened any following that he might have
had among anyone of a politically conservative or even moderate bent.
Possibly, there is some middle ground
between the belief that what we have here is a complete fabrication by Chiniquy and the conclusion that these were Lincoln’s
actual beliefs as reflected in his statements to Chiniquy
at the time of the latter’s brief visits to the White House. Lincoln certainly knew his audience, and Chiniquy was a man with a large following. He was a man of influence with whom Lincoln
would have wanted to curry as much favor as possible. The way to do it would have been to appeal to
his prejudices and tell him the sort of things that he wanted to hear. Maybe, then the politician Lincoln was primarily
interested in motivating Chiniquy to do everything in
his considerable power to drum up support for Lincoln and his war. At the same time, there could have been an
understanding between the two, either tacit or explicit, that Lincoln’s actual
words would not be passed along for a considerably long time because of the
sensitivity of the subject.
A possible large joker in the deck
supplying at least a grain of truth to the Lincoln and Chiniquy
charges is the matter of Lincoln’s assassination. It is a fact that those who were convicted
and hanged for the conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln were Roman Catholics. Even more incriminating of the Church is that
John Surratt, one of the accused conspirators and the son of the H Street
rooming house landlady, Mary Surratt, one of those hanged for the crime, was
able to escape to Canada and then to Europe, ending up as a Soave guard in the
Vatican under an assumed name, with the help of several Catholic priests. Chiniquy and the
author Harris see the powerful hand of the treacherous Jesuit Society at work.
The Jesuits were a known conspiratorial
organization. If one does a Web search
using the words “Jesuits, Illuminati, Alumbrados” all
sorts of possibilities come into play.
In my article, “Life in the
Confederate Army,”
I note that both Lincoln and Jefferson Davis seemed insufficiently wary of war
in the manner of their handling the Ft. Sumter conflict. It could hardly be clearer that Lincoln
wanted war, but it also appears that Davis was insufficiently afraid of
it. It’s enough to make one wonder if
both of them might have been manipulated by an unseen hand wanting to bring
about the conflagration that transpired.
When one brings the Jesuits into the picture, we’re also into the world
of the Illuminati and from there it’s only a short step to the nefarious
controlling banker world. It works even
better as an explanation for Lincoln’s assassination, if not for the Baltimore
plot prior to his inauguration. By
financing the war from the Union side through the printing of greenbacks rather
than using the traditional European method of borrowing from the powerful
banks, Lincoln could have made himself a marked man for assassination.
Such speculations as these we shall have
to leave as grist for a possible future article.
David Martin
August 7, 2020
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